Radar Curatorial recommends Francesco Simeti’s show Swell at Open Source Gallery. Swell is a theatrical installation that explores human impact on the environment. The show, a large motorized diorama, takes on our relationship with the environment with a focus on Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.

Getting to step right up to this room-size diorama is downright child-like fun. The physicallity allows a welcoming way to initially engage the work and the mixed-media of historal imagery and illustrations recalls the tools of research and reference. Simeti’s use of flora and fauna native to Brooklyn and the Gowanus Canal adds a playful dream-like aspiration for what is a body of water now recognized as one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States and is a Superfund site.

Once spending some time with the work you experience the artist’s expression of contradistinctions. It reveals itself to be a meditation on nature versus machine, present versus past, growth versus destruction and movement versus stagnation.

The work can be seen from April 22-May 27, 2017 at Open Source Gallery, 306 17th Street, Brooklyn, Thursday-Saturday: 2-6pm.